Bee County Texas map
28.42° N · 97.74° W · County seat: Beeville · 880 sq mi
Bee County has essentially no standing water — one-tenth of a square mile out of 880 — and the Aransas River begins inside it, southwest of Beeville. The county was assembled in 1857 out of pieces of five older counties, and its recent history turns on a Navy base that closed in 1993 and what moved into it afterwards.
Beeville sits where US-59 and US-181 cross. The former Chase Field runways are the pale cross-shape immediately east of town.
Where Bee County is
Bee County was created on 8 December 1857 from parts of San Patricio, Goliad, Refugio, Live Oak and Karnes counties and organized the next year. It is named for Barnard Elliott Bee Sr., who served the Republic of Texas as secretary of state and as its minister to the United States.
All five of the counties it was cut from are still its neighbours: Karnes north, Goliad northeast, Refugio east, San Patricio southeast and Live Oak west. Corpus Christi is about 47 miles southeast down US-181, Victoria 52 miles northeast on US-59 and San Antonio 83 miles northwest. The whole county forms the Beeville micropolitan statistical area.
Cities and towns
| Place | Type | Population (2020) |
|---|---|---|
| Beeville (county seat) | City — the only incorporated place | 13,676 |
Skidmore, Normanna, Pettus, Tuleta, Tynan, Blue Berry Hill and Mineral are unincorporated communities strung along the highways. Beeville holds about 44 percent of the county's residents; a large share of the remainder is counted in the state prison units east of town.
Roads
- US-59 – the northeast–southwest route, from Goliad through Beeville toward George West and I-37. Interstate 69W is planned to follow it.
- US-181 – the northwest–southeast route, from Karnes City through Beeville, Skidmore and Sinton to Corpus Christi.
- SH-202 – east from Beeville to Refugio.
- SH-359 – southwest from Skidmore toward Mathis and Alice.
- SH-72 – west from Tynan and Skidmore toward Three Rivers.
- FM-673, FM-799 and FM-888 – the farm-road grid over the cotton and grain sorghum country.
Chase Field and what replaced it
Naval Air Station Chase Field opened east of Beeville during the Second World War as a training field and spent the Cold War as a jet training base, flying the TA-4 Skyhawk and later the T-2 Buckeye and T-45. It was closed under the base realignment process in 1993, taking with it several thousand military and civilian jobs from a county of about 25,000 people at the time — one of the sharpest single economic losses any small Texas county has absorbed.
The site became the Chase Field Industrial Complex, with the runways kept in service as Chase Field Industrial Airport. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice put three units on and around the property — the McConnell Unit and the Garza East and Garza West transfer facilities — and corrections is now among the county's biggest employers. Coastal Bend College, founded in 1965 as Bee County College and renamed in 1997, runs its main campus in Beeville with branches in Alice, Kingsville and Pleasanton.
Shale gas and farmland
Bee County sits on the southeastern flank of the Eagle Ford shale, in the wetter gas-bearing part of the play rather than the oil window farther northwest. Drilling from 2009 onward brought truck traffic, man-camps and a hotel boom to Beeville, and the county's tax base rose and fell with the rig count. Older fields near Pettus and Normanna had been producing since the 1930s.
Away from the well pads the land is farmed — grain sorghum, cotton and corn on the Blackland and sandy loam soils — and grazed. The Aransas River rises here and runs southeast toward Copano Bay in Aransas County; the county's other drainage is by Blanco, Medio and Poesta creeks into the Nueces and San Antonio river systems.